“Just Close Your Eyes and Chew!”: Spirulina, Modernization, and the “Lost” Crops of the Past

On February 20, 2017, the young nation of South Sudan declared that it was suffering famine in several regions of the country.1 It was the first of several nations, including Yemen, Nigeria, and Somalia, that have begun to suffer severe food scarcity this year, resulting in what is arguably the largest humanitarian crisis in decades. Unfortunately, the story of famine in these regions is nothing new, and humanitarian aid has a long history of addressing famine around the world in the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1960s and 70s, for instance, scientists began to “rediscover” native plants and animals as part of a push to modernize underdeveloped nations and provide food sources for impoverished nations during times of famine. 2 Looking back at the history of these attempts and the contemporary fruits of the research surrounding them is topical, especially considering the increasingly disastrous famines that are now brewing in North Africa and the Middle East.

Much of the research into new methods of agricultural production in the 1960s to the present day has been undertaken by government agencies. The Board on Science and Technology for International Development (BOSTID) was a USAID affiliated agency created for just these efforts. Formed in 1969, at the height of the Green Revolution, BOSTID was intended to pursue the cutting edge of modernization efforts with Third World nations, and throughout its nearly thirty-year span of existence, BOSTID was responsible for conducting a wide variety of research projects on development around the world. One of their most frequent lines of study was the resurrection of these “lost” crops, of which there were quite a few.3

Take, for example, spirulina. It might be recognizable nowadays as that “thing” you saw at a health food store, as a strangely named ingredient on the back of popular vegetable smoothies, or one of those odd vitamin supplements that doctors recommend at annual physicals.4 But spirulina has a long, tangled history that belies its modern, health conscious appearance — so what, exactly, is it?

Spirulina is a microalgae, a tiny, one-celled organism. The first recorded evidence of humanity using spirulina was during the Aztec Empire. Spanish conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo recounts that during the Spanish siege of Tenochtitlán, Hernan Cortés’ men noted that the natives were collecting “a sort of ooze” from the nearby Lake Texcoco, one that they then dried and consumed. Castillo himself tried it and wrote that it, peculiarly, had the “flavor of cheese.”5

The natives reportedly dried and sold the “ooze” as a staple food, in the Tenochtitlán market. Castillo’s account is reinforced by several others. Franciscan friars exploring the region and acting as pseudo-naturalists wrote about the dried “slime,” which the locals called tecuitlatl (the “excrement of stones”), and detailed its sale and consumption around the area.6 Cortés himself mentions the gathering and drying methods of the tecuitlatl and said that the cheesy-flavored substance, which was neither “plant nor earth, but a sort of mud,” was apparently rather delicious.7

Several hundred years later, and around the world, tecuitlatl was discovered again by enterprising scientists. In 1940 and then 1966, French botanists reported on dihe, a strange, blue-green bread-like substance that was harvested and consumed by locals near Lake Chad.8 It was spirulina. From 1966 onward, research efforts into spirulina took off, resulting in an increasing popularity that peaked in the 1980s as it became a health food fad. Newspaper articles implored people to “Just Close Your Eyes and Chew” the nutrient-rich algae.9

Yet spirulina was not alone. There were a multitude of similarly “rediscovered” foods that have become popularized in modern culture, and many superfoods, crops or food breakthroughs that seemed to herald a new age of plenty for the increasingly hungry world.10 Many of the popular health foods of the present day have their roots in the research of groups like BOSTID. Amaranth, for example, was “rediscovered” and promoted by BOSTID, and eventually, the wider agricultural community. The winged bean, another BOSTID find, quickly became a popular crop in over seventy countries worldwide. Spirulina, too, was a BOSTID investigated crop.11

The efforts of BOSTID and other such groups have resulted in a surge of new crops over the past forty years, which were then combined with new harvesting and planting methods, pesticides, and genetic modifications to produce even more bountiful crop yields. These efforts have continued to be promoted by individual national-level governments, but the international community at large has increasingly become involved, which is an important step forward for the viability of these new crops in the long term.

The United Nations, as an example, has an affiliated intergovernmental observer group named the Intergovernmental Institution for the use of Micro-algae Spirulina Against Malnutrition (IIMSAM), which is part of the broader Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) of the U.N., and it explicitly researches and promotes spirulina production efforts in developing countries.12 The efforts on the part of groups like IIMSAM help form an important vanguard in the fight against global hunger and malnutrition.

Indeed, going forward, the tasks of NGOs and governments alike are aligning together against the increasingly tenuous nature of food safety around the world. The shock that people around the globe have expressed toward the famine situations in North Africa and the Middle East demonstrate not only the complacent nature that the wider world has taken toward food scarcity, but also the ability of the international community to tackle such problems. Increasingly, the nations that have historically been chronic sufferers of food scarcity have begun to take proactive and more effective measures against it.13 The efforts of groups like IIMSAM, and the “rediscovered” crops that they promote, are a key part of this movement.

Board on Science and Technology for International Development, Commission on International Relations, “Underexploited Tropical Plants with Promising Economic Value: Report of an Ad Hoc Panel of the Advisory Committee on Technology Innovation,” National Research Council (U.S.), Panel on Underexploited Tropical Plants with Promising Economic Value (National Academies, 1975); see BOSTID’s other publications, such as “Making Aquatic Weeds Useful: Some Perspectives for Developing Countries”; and “Tropical Legumes: Resources for the Future.”

Jane E. Brody, “Ancient, Forgotten Plant Now ‘Grain of the Future,” New York Times, October 16, 1984.

See BOSTID’s publications, such as “Making Aquatic Weeds Useful: Some Perspectives for Developing Countries”; and “Tropical Legumes: Resources for the Future.” The National Academies of Science provides a running list of digitized BOSTID reports.

See IIMSAM for more information, including a updating list of countries that IIMSAM is active in.